Mnemonic (20 page)

I alight as a beetle on the empty throne which is on your bark, O Re!

— from an Egyptian Pyramid Text from the fifth and sixth dynasties, ca. 2556 - 2150 BC
¹

Consider the beetles themselves. Black or dark brown, the size of a grain of rice. Not unattractive, as beetles go. Not immediately scary. They bore into the bark of the host tree — ponderosa, lodgepole, Scots, limber, bristlecone, pinyon (these last two less frequently) — and create vertical galleries in the phloem layer, where they deposit their eggs. The larvae feed horizontally; this scribble of galleries and feeding paths is what you can see on a dead tree once the bark is removed, a calligraphy of darker brown against the tan wood. Read these glyphs like a text: a story of soft tissue consumed by larvae as they eat their way into adulthood and out of the tree; the invasion of a type of
ophiostoma
or blue-staining fungi introduced by the adults — it adheres to their exoskeleton and travels with them — which spreads and disrupts the flow of water and nutrients within the tree, causing its death. Run your hands along a standing tree to feel the pitch tubes, the lumps of resin that indicate where a beetle has burrowed in, or out, of a tree, the tree's attempts to heal itself. Smell your hands. Turpentine will come to mind, and the antiseptic whiff of a travelling vet.

It's perverse to admire an insect capable of such devastation. And yet beetles have been worshipped since prehistory. Scarab pendants have been dated to the late Palaeolithic — 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Because of their ability to fly and to burrow, the beetles were thought of as mediators between the terrestrial and celestial worlds. They have associations with creation in societies ranging from shamanic groups in South America to Sumatra to Egypt. In those ancient cultures which believed that humans were modelled from clay, what better symbol than that ur-potter, the scarab beetle, gathering and shaping dung into a ball? If one observed that ball long enough, it would come to life, the tiny larvae of a new generation emerging from its centre.

Coming down the long slope from Rose Hill to Kamloops a couple of days earlier, I'd seen many trees felled in residential yards — big trees; a source of shade in this dry hot country, and a place for squirrels and birds to forage and nest. Felled, they brought to mind “Binsey Poplars,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (from his
Poems
), a few lines of which echoed in my mind for days:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled . . .

It was hard, driving past them, not to think of sandalled feet in the heat of summer, dangling, as a child dreamed in the boughs. To think of sunlight filtering into the inner shade of the trees, the latticework of needles casting an intricate shadow. At the rest area east of Savona, I think of the lines again, with sadness. My dear pines,
whose airy cages quelled
the intense heat of a summer sun, on whose limbs darted the pine grosbeaks, the Clark's nutcrackers, down whose trunks pygmy nuthatches made their circular waltz — not all gone, not yet, but certainly diminished.

I want to look at the crafts at the Big Sky gas station at Skeetchestn, so we pull in. There are some pieces of jewellery in a glass case and a few baskets, some of birchbark with coloured quill or imbrication work, and a couple of small pine-needle baskets. They aren't as fine as some I've seen, but they give me hope. I imagine them as the work of girls learning from older women, their fingers learning about tension and scale. I'd like to ask to have a closer look at them, but the two women at work in the store are swaying to Patsy Cline, one of them holding the arms of the other, laughing about something one of them has said in a very low voice. No one notices me, examining the baskets intently; no one offers to open the case. I don't want to interrupt an intimate moment as the women fall to pieces with Patsy, so I leave.

At Red Hill, south of Ashcroft, I gather more needles, these from dead trees. A magpie swerves from the branches of one, heads over the hill. And I can hear a woodpecker knocking. At Nicola Lake, I hear a pileated woodpecker and think how rich the feeding would be for them — larvae and beetles in the millions. Yet the numbers are barely touched by birds because everywhere, pine trees are dying.

The final stop for gathering is Skihist, near Lytton. On the bench stuck out over the Thompson River, the needles — all from living trees — are the longest yet. I suspect this is because the pines here are growing in the grassy picnic site, which is watered regularly. On the Sunday morning in late September when we stop for a walk and for me to collect needles, the sprinklers must have just shut off because the grass and paved pathways are wet, a few squirrels drinking from the puddles. I've seen pine-needle baskets made by a Nlaka'pamux woman in Lytton; exquisite, tight constructions, the stitching as fine as embroidery. I wonder if she uses needles from irrigated trees; if she's found that they are suppler, more pliant. Already I'm making assumptions about something I know almost nothing about. I label the Skihist bundle, though it's not really necessary. These needles lie on top of the bucket like leggy models among ordinary girls.

Then home down the Fraser Canyon where the pines thin out and dwindle by Boston Bar, though a few are still straight-standing and tall down near Alexandria Bridge.

So many beetles are beautiful. Metallic green, bearing curved horns, limned with gold: no wonder they inspired jewellery fit for a pharaoh. The buprestids are as lovely as any, some of them iridescent blue or green, with coppery detail. Other species are lacquered black and red or yellow, small eyes painted onto their cuticle.

This summer I was sitting on our deck, reading and making notes, when a huge beetle landed on my book. Its body was at least a centimetre long with antennae twice as long again. The body was almost bronze, with silvery speckles, and there were blue spots on the elytra or forewings. I watched it for ten or fifteen minutes as it walked on the table, then flew up to the eavestrough on the roof of the sunroom adjacent to the deck, its antennae waving elegantly as it searched the air.

I left to find a field guide, and when I returned, the beetle had disappeared. I'd made a descriptive note while I watched it, though, and was able to determine it was a
Monochamus maculosus
, or spotted sawyer, a beetle perhaps as potentially dangerous in its way as the mountain pine beetle. Their life cycles are similar — the females cut into bark and lay their eggs within the tree (they attack pines, spruce, and fir, depending on which species of
Monochamus
they are, and where they live in North America), and then the larvae bore tunnels, eating soft tissue, until they pupate; the adults eat their way out of the tree.

It's not difficult to imagine an army of spotted sawyers intent on devouring a forest, their formidable antennae searching and interrogating as the insects mount likely trees. One would see them, feel them underfoot the way people have described a plague of locusts, the cracking of their shells everywhere. But I think the difference is scale. A series of mild winters has meant that the mountain pine beetles have multiplied beyond anyone's wildest estimation and although tiny in themselves — seemingly vulnerable when seen in photographs as larvae curled up in their galleries — in multitudes they have decimated huge tracts of British Columbia's forests.

Consider the numbers of beetles themselves, Biblical in proportion, gnawing their way through the Interior. In ancient Egypt, the dead wore special scarab amulets over their hearts, in part to ensure resurrection, following the belief that Khepri, a scarab god, pushed the sun from the eastern sky to the western horizon.
²
(As the dung ball created by a scarab beetle was pushed and buried in earth to hide it from predators, so the sun rolled over the horizon into the ground for the night, to be reborn in the east each morning. A perfect enactment of birth and death, of rising and setting.) In “Beetles As Religious Symbols,” Yves Cambefort tells us that an Egyptian writer, Horapollo, in a treatise on hieroglyphs available to us only in its Greek translation, revealed that the word for “scarab” and the Greek word “monogenes” or “only begotten,” used for Christ, were one and the same. (Christian authors such as John used “monogenes” for Christ in his Gospel 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”)

On a recent trip to the Nicola Valley, we saw little white bags hanging from the healthy pines in Monck Park. Amulets, I thought — (
over their hearts
) — and in some ways, I was right. The bags held Verbenone, a synthetic version of a pheromone used by beetles to announce to others that the tree is off limits, already in use. When I did some reading about this method of repelling the beetles, the experts recommending it were as insistent about the way it needed to be used (hung as high as one could reach, on the north or shady side of the tree) as were those advising on placement of scarabs in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead
, a sign that, beyond the science, belief systems may be as dogmatic now as they were in the fourteenth century BC.

Listening: a diagnostic

I discovered the work of Alex Metcalf while reading the
Guardian
online. We used to get the international edition of the newspaper itself passed along to us and I enjoyed the nature column by Ralph Whitlock, a kind of old-fashioned ramble through the English countryside, written in a slightly formal way, full of lore and decency. I liked the book reviews, too, and this has led me to continue, in a way, my relationship with the
Guardian
: every Saturday morning I read the book pages online as well as other arts coverage.

Metcalf, a British artist and educator, has developed a device for listening to trees. The device itself is very handsome, like a streamlined ear trumpet in some sort of polished metal. What makes it interesting is that it contains a sophisticated system for amplifying sound and for filtering out ambient noise. When it's positioned on the trunk of a tree, one can hear the tree drinking. There's a
whoosh
as the xylem draws up water and nutrients, then clicking as the water is taken into cells, displacing air.
Click, click
. That's the air escaping and the water entering. People knew that trees drank before Alex Metcalf's work, but the process for hearing it was intrusive, and involved drilling into the trunk. The
Guardian
reviewed Metcalf's show at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, near London, in which a number of the listening devices were hung from various trees. Someone could simply take the device, hold it to the tree, and listen. A simple but remarkable idea.

I remember hearing my unborn children's heartbeats for the first time, during an ultrasound procedure, and vowing that nothing would ever hurt them. Introducing children to the sentience of trees, letting them hear the sound of a big tree taking in water, to let them meet as organisms, one drinking, the other witnessing, could no doubt instil a deep respect which could change the way many people view the natural world.

It occurred to me that I might be able to listen to ponderosa pines drinking — well, any tree for that matter but it was pines I was thinking about at the time — and that a living tree and a dying tree would probably sound different. Or would they? I thought, for instance, that a tree dying as a result of beetle damage might be thirsty; its ability to take up sufficient water compromised by all that insect activity and the effects of the blue-staining fungus.